Launch day!

5

Screenshots of brianjmatis.com website

I’m pleased to announce the official re-launch of www.brianjmatis.com!

“Re-launch? I didn’t even know there was a www.brianjmatis.com, or if I did know, I didn’t realize you still cared about it. I just thought your flickr was the place to see your photos.”

Well, I’ve actually owned the domain for years and used it to host a small photography portfolio of mine. But it’s languished for ages, had no recent photos, and even worse, required the use of Flash. (Sin of sins! The ghost of Steve Jobs haunts me every night!)

But now that I’m working on taking my photography to the next level, it was clearly time to do a total revamp and turn the site into something much, much more.

“But your flickr shows all your photos. Why make this?”

Basically, for better control. With flickr, as much as I love it, I’m at the mercy of their redesigns. Some of it I’ve liked, some of it I haven’t. For example, they used to have a nice view that would show text along with the images in the main photo feed, but now their new design for the photostream focuses only on displaying photos. For me, that’s kind of a shame since I often have some sort of words or story to go along with the photo, and now, that content is pretty buried. Plus, I feel like the new photostream design is pretty chaotic looking. (Needs more whitespace! And a proper grid layout!) But here, I can present things the way I want.

Plus, there’s also the fact that through flickr, I can’t make any attempts at earning some cash through all the views I get over there (look, even photographers have to pay rent. Plus, photo gear is expensive.) So if there’s camera equipment or other cool stuff that I particularly like and want to write about (and throw in a referral link) I can’t do that with flickr. But here I can. (Don’t worry, www.brianjmatis.com won’t be inundating you with ads – I vastly prefer a tailored, minimalist approach to that sort of thing. I’ll focus on promoting what I like and that I think you might like too. Win-win, right?)

“Ok I get it. So what’ll be going on here?”

Well, it’ll be the new home of my Photo-a-Day project. That’s where I take, process, and post a new photograph, every single day. It’s the sort of thing you may have seen referred to as a Project365, but that term is kinda not right for me anymore… You see, after I finished my Project365 back in 2009, I basically missed the part where you’re supposed to stop. In fact, I just recently hit the 2,000 day milestone.

“2,000 days?!? What the f**k is wrong with you?”

I think I either really love photography, or I have a mild obsessive compulsive disorder. Probably both.

“Ok, anyway, sorry to interrupt. You were saying earlier about what’ll be going on?”

Yes. No worries. So anyway, not only is it the new home for Photo-a-Day, but it’ll also be for:

  • Running and hosting my portfolio.
  • Writing about photography. Opinions, tips, lessons, gear reviews, that sort of thing. (Plus occasionally a few other topics near and dear to me, like running and technology.)
  • Linking to other blogs and stories that inspire, educate or otherwise interest me.
  • Providing a central point of contact for people to get in touch with me and see what I’m all about.

“Sounds good! So other than the ongoing work of posting photos and stories, the site’s pretty much good to go, right?”

Heh, not quite. There’s still a bunch on the to-do list; like adding more to the portfolio, getting set up for doing print sales, setting up a referral link program, adding a download portal for client work, and having a newsletter.

Oh, and then there’s the horrendous task of migrating over the full Photo-a-Day archives… I’m honestly not too sure how or entirely if I want to go about that… I imagine that discussion can be an entire blog post in itself. But for now, if you want to see the whole history of Photo-a-Day, I encourage you to check out my photostream on flickr.

“Ok, got it. Anything else you’d like to add?”

Sure! If you don’t feel like remembering or typing out all of www.brianjmatis.com, you can also use www.brianmatis.com or even the uber-simple www.bmatis.com.

But mostly, I’d like to thank you for being here and reading all of this. I hope you enjoy what you see and that you keep coming back! Photo-a-Day ensures that there’ll be something new every day (unless I’m off camping and no have internet access for uploading the photos or something like that… But then there’ll be some nice catch-up postings when I’m back.) ;-)

Regards,
Brian

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5 comments


  • Oh, and one other thing. If you’re wondering why there’s already a few weeks worth of posts prior to this one, even though this is ostensibly the “launch” post, it’s because I was blogging here in secret while getting things set up. In fact, the whole new site was hidden away in a subdirectory until early this morning when I promoted it up to the root domain.

    June 26, 2014
  • Awesome, Brian!

    June 26, 2014
    • Thanks! (And I’ve really got to figure out the whole commenter icon image thing… But that’s not until a much later chapter in my WordPress book!)

      June 26, 2014
      • Alright, I skipped ahead in the book to figure out the comment icons. And now I should add info to the site to help other people be able to set up their own icons!

        June 28, 2014
  • […] and my 2,000th consecutive Photo-a-Day. (Plus, this week managed to get the extra bonus of the new website launch. What a […]

    June 28, 2014

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